Female candidates have this time round beaten their male counterparts in the just releases Uganda Certificate of Advanced Education (UACE) examinations of 2020, a quite unusual stance.
During the release of the results on Friday, the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) Executive Secretary, Mr Daniel Odongo, noted that female candidates, although fewer performed better.
“The percentage passes at the upper levels (3P and 2P) are higher while percentage passes at lower levels and failure rate among female candidates are lower than for the males,” Odongo said.
Performance of candidates in the large entry subjects and General Paper in 2020 is compared to that in the previous year, 2019.
There is overall improvement in all the subjects apart from Literature in English.
Although there is a drop in the number of candidates registered this year, entries for the Science subjects and Mathematics increased significantly compared to entries for 2019.
Entries for Sciences are, however, much lower than for the Arts subjects.
In terms of percentages, female candidates performed better than their male counterparts at the principal level pass (A-E) in Arts (Humanities), Mathematics and Physics. Male candidates were better in Agriculture, Chemistry, Biology, Art, and General Paper.
Female entries for the Sciences and Mathematics have remained far lower than that of the males.
Only 26.7% sat for Mathematics, 6.9% for Physics, 13.2% for Chemistry; and 12.3% for Biology.
Meanwhile, the board did not register any candidates for UACE at Luzira Prison, as has been the norm in the previous years. They, however had some candidates in UCE and PLE.
A total of 98,392 candidates registered for the 2020 UACE examination from 1,952 centres compared to 104,476 candidates from 2,094 centres in 2019, a decline of 6,084 candidates.
Out of the total number of registered candidates, 97,084 actually sat for exams out of which 41,190 were female.
A total of 26,602 passed with two principle passes,19,015 with 1 principle pass and 9,616 passed with 1 subsidiary.
796 candidates failed the exams, having not scored a single point. These are compared to 1,433 who failed completely in 2019.
According to Odongo, 99.2 per cent qualify for the award of UACE certificate but only 69.8 of these totaling to 68,013 qualify to join university after attaining more than two principle passes as a standard requirement by higher institutions of learning.
